imajeepnut

I'm about to order an '08 Rubicon. I have heard that the Dealer you order from makes a difference on the timeliness of the delivery. If I ordered from a CarMax or other dealer that has a High previous order volume of JKs...would I stand a better chance of getting mine any quicker? Or if I ordered from my local Family dealer who only has 1 or 2 on the lot per year....would they be slower?


Thanks,
Jeff

Ghostship

You should really ask your question in the JK Talk section of the forum, and you should check out the "Check the Status of your Jeep JK Wrangler" sticky thread at the top of that page, there's a ton of good information there:
https://www.jk-forum.com/forums/show...t=161&page=258

The short answer is: Yes, it can effect how long your order takes to get built, but that won't be the major contributor to the length of time you'll wait for a Rubicon order placed today.

Yes, how many vehicles a Jeep dealer gets for their inventory this year depends on how many vehicles they sold last year, called 'allocation'. This is how Chrysler attempts to insure that the higher sales volume dealers receive a higher percentage of vehicles to sell, while lower volume dealers don't load up their lots with vehicles that could have sold elsewhere. One thing most people overlook is that a customer order at a large volume dealer competes against more customers, compared to less order competition at the low volume dealers. So it pretty much balances out, unless you order from a low volume dealer so late in the year that they have already received all of that year's allocation. But that's not nearly as common an occurrence as people will have you believe.

The real problem you'll face with your order's wait time is the model of Wrangler you order, and the current demand and production capacity for that model. Currently there are over 40,000 customer orders in the system for all Wranglers, and over 12,000 orders just for Rubicons. They are only able to build roughly 385 Rubicons per week. 12k/385 = ~31 weeks or almost 8 months average required to build all the Rubicon orders ahead of yours. That is why you will wait so long for your order to be built, the # of people ahead of you in line, and not your dealer's allocation.

If you're getting a 2door Rubicon, the average wait has been between 4 and 6 months (some even quicker). Rubicon Unlimiteds have been waiting 6 to 10 months average.

BLKRUBI

Yes, it's all about allocation. Bigger dealers(i.e. dealers that sell more JK's or Chrysler's/Dodge's/Jeeps in general) are going to have the first crack at limited prodution vehicles.

yetibear

of course by the same token they sell more of those limited production vehicles so have used up more allocation so they have less slots open. The little guy has less to begin with. It is kind of a wash.

MJS_Jeep_888

Excellent post, Ghostship.

One additional factor that you missed is that the factory only runs one paint color at a time. So, the schedule of production is pretty evenly distributed among color (so you may wait quite awhile if your color just ran last week, because they may now cycle through every other color before getting back to yours, and of course, there are a LOT of orders ahead of yours).

Bottom line: Expect to wait like everyone else. Order from the dealer you trust most, and the dealership that offers you the best overall deal. Hopefully, those dealerships are one and the same.

yetibear

What he said!^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^